From forced lesbian sex scenes to death threats: Salma Hayek opens up about Harvey Weinstein

Salma Hayek has finally come forward about her harrowing encounters with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and in a powerful op-ed in The New York Times, the actress reveals how saying "yes" to working with him, eventually led her to saying "no" – multiple times – to his unsolicited advances.

Headlined "Harvey Weinstein is My Monster Too", Salma, 51, opens up about the making of her 2002 passion project Frida – the film based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and how it ended up a constant nightmare for her, trying to refuse Weinstein's sexual demands and death threats.

Also read: Lupita Nyong'o opens up about TERRIFYING Harvey Weinstein encounter

"No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn't even involved with."

"No to me taking a shower with him. No to letting him watch me take a shower. No to letting him give me a massage. No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage. No to letting him give me oral sex. No to my getting naked with another woman. No, no, no, no, no," she wrote.

But the list doesn't stop there; Salma shares the countless hoops she jumped to turn the biopic into a reality, and after everything was ready, Weinstein refused to release the movie unless there was a naked lesbian sex scene, which he very conveniently, "does not recall" now.

And then came the "Machiavellian rage", as she describes in her own words, when Weinstein threatened her, saying: "I will kill you, don't think I can't."

From being forced out of the Venice Film Festival just to join a private party of Weinstein's with, as she discovered later, a bunch of high-end prostitutes, to informing her that she had given her role and script for Frida to another actress – Salma was tortured by him in any way, as she shares.

"When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress," writes Hayek. "In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn't even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body."

Refusing to back down, she filed a "bad faith" lawsuit against him, which finally allowed her to gain control of the movie. But when filming commenced, Weinstein was back with his monstrosity.

At one point, he even claimed to shut down the movie because in his words, "the only thing [she] had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie."

That, she says, is what made her agree to do the lesbian sex scene, even though it gave her a nervous breakdown for the "first and last time" in her career.

"It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then."

That day, Salma had taken a tranquillizer to get through the scene, wrapping up soon after; but today, she refuses to stay quiet, as she wraps up her letter, saying: "Men sexually harassed because they could. Women are talking today because, in this new era, we finally can."